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Bahmu
The bahmu is a strictly carnivorous, nocturnal, quadrupedal bird native exclusively to the ravine jungles of Aenvarna. One of the less appealing wild animals found in the jungle, it is a part-bald, sparsely furred creature with a shaggy, greasy coat of hair that thins to bare, warty skin on the extremities, and it reeks of the stench of death and decay. Highly muscular, it can climb up the sheerest rock face with its powerful arms and recurved claws, shuffling rapidly sideways like a spider. Though its eyes are well-developed and able to make the most of what little moonlight reaches down into the ravine forest at night, on most nights this is negligible and the bahmu effectively hunts blind, instead relying on a three-dimensional mental map formed by pings of sonar which it uses to navigate its complex environment. Prey which lies motionless in crevices in the rock and so does not show readily by sonar is located primarily by food by scent. The predator probes its grotesquely hairless snout, adapted to prevent blood and offal from soiling its pelage, into any pitch black crevice it comes across on the sheer cliffs. Like a vulture it has an open septum '''- a single fused nostril rich in wet mucous membranes which provides an especially strong sense of smell that lets the bahmu hone in on hiding prey. When a victim is found the predator's activity heightens considerably and it circles the crevice, pinging its sonar rapidly at an audible pitch in order to disorient the animal inside and make it move, giving the predator a precise bead on its location in the rocks. It then reaches its long, raptorial arm into the hole and grasps fiercely with its talons to try and hook the animal and pluck it from its hideout. If the crevice is deep enough, the prey may cling just out of reach and eventually lose interest of the hunter. If by chance the hiding space is a shallow one, however, there is nowhere to go. The bahmu plucks sunsharks, frogs, mammals and smaller birds from their hiding places in a swift motion and kills them with a rapid bite to the head or neck with the powerful beaked jaws. Its beak, though toothless, features sharply hooked projections on either side adapted to deliver the most precise killing bite to disable the prey before it has any opportunity to turn and bite its attacker. It then feeds quickly, often while clinging upside down to the cliff by its feet. With ankles with rotating joints that can almost totally reverse, it uses its opposable toes to grip the rocks and holds the prey in its front legs while quickly biting it apart, starting at the head, and swallowing the gobbets of flesh and bone alike in rapacious gulps. Its messy feeding inevitably stains its face and hair with blood and grease which the carnivore makes little effort to groom away, resulting in its foul odor that can be detected from a significant distance in the heavy night air. Possibly due to this as much as its over the top vicious display if harassed by a larger carnivore - involving shrieking and slashing of the claws which could blind a manguar with a lucky strike - '''few other predators bother the bahmu, '''most giving it a wide berth. It is certain that the bahmu use their intense odor, which is also strengthened through its very strong-smelling waste, to mark their territories and avoid one another; the species is extremely hostile to one another except for very brief, rare encounters between males and receptive females. '''When two bahmu meet at other times, the most likely outcome is the cannibalism of the larger upon the smaller. To improve the odds of successful reproduction, the female is thus the larger of the two sexes, meaning it is most often the male which becomes a meal. As one male can mate with many females, they are the more disposable sex; as many as fifty percent of males may be killed by females within the first two years of life. Fortunately for them, they can breed from the age of one. Not even females and their offspring have any well-developed bond:' the bahmu is a nasty nest parasite', dropping its eggs in the nests of its distant relatives, the parrot-like psittacorillas, which rear them unwittingly. The superprecocial bahmu chicks hatch first and while under their protective brooding mother proceed to use a prominent egg tooth on their beaks to break open their foster sibling's eggs. They consume the unborn embryos over several days while protected underneath their adoptive parents before abandoning the nest during the night and going off alone, leaving their adoptive parent with nothing to show for their efforts. ~~~ ' The ravine jungle is an environment that spans two very different worlds separated only by time. '''By day, gentle rain showers produce a world of apparent paradisaical splendor, home to beautiful, colorful animals. At night, however, the cloak of darkness transforms the jungle into a deadly force of nature, where monsters lurk and crawl and even the weather turns against its inhabitants. Few interactions embody the stark dichotomy of this single environment as a night-stalking bahmu feeding upon the carcass of a beautiful diurnal sunshark: quite literally, the darkness feasting upon the light. Yet the bahmu despite its appearance is not evil, merely it is too a creature which only does what it must to survive. Forged by this remarkably complex and unique environment, '''both creatures have simply adapted very differently to the opportunities the ravine jungle provides.' Sheather888 Category:Birds Category:Carnivores Category:Dinosaurs Category:Theropods